ELON UNCUT - THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW | Verdict Ep. 216
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (16)
Transcript
0:08Ben FergusonWelcome. It is verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you. And today is our exclusive conversation with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and innovator who is transforming industries and is dismantling government waste, fraud and abuse.
0:22Ben FergusonWith Doge Musk's relentless pursuit of technology and space exploration continues to capture the world's imagination. In this episode, we unravel the thoughts and aspirations of a man who defies conventional boundaries, pushing humanity towards new horizons.
0:38Ben FergusonSo join us in the White House as we continue to explore the riveting journey of Elon Musk, a modern day pioneer whose revolutionary ideas are set to redefine tomorrow.
0:49Ben FergusonToday is a really fun day, Senator, because we have a special guest and we're in a special place. I'm going to let you do the
0:55Ted Cruzrest of the intro. Well, we're in the White House right now and we're here with my friend Elon Musk, who really has not been doing much of anything, has not made any news, is.
1:04Ted CruzAnd nobody has noticed.
1:06Elon MuskYeah.
1:07Ted CruzThe impact. Welcome, Elon.
1:09Elon MuskThank you.
1:09Ted CruzHoly crap.
1:11Elon MuskYes. Wow.
1:12Ted CruzLet me just say never a dull moment. Never a dull moment. The first 50 days the President has spent in office over the top and the first 50 days you've spent.
1:24Ted CruzI don't think there's ever been anyone to have an impact the way you have beginning. Well, let me, let me start with a question. You know a lot about which was worse, the mess you found at Twitter or the mess you found in the federal government?
1:37Elon MuskWell, it's hard to compete with the federal government.
1:40Ted CruzWhat surprised you about the federal government? I assume you came in and assumed it was bad. Is it worse than you expected?
1:47Elon MuskIt is worse than I expected. But on the plus side, that means there's more opportunity for improvement. So look, if you look on the bright side, there's, there's actually a lot of opportunity for improvement in federal government expenditures.
2:00Elon MuskBecause it's so bad. If it was a well run ship, it would be very difficult to improve.
2:05Ted CruzSo like.
2:05Elon MuskBut, but yeah. So now it's like people say, well, how, how will you figure out how to save money in the federal government? Well, it's like being in a room where the, the walls, the roof and the floor are all targets.
2:14Elon MuskSo you shoot any direction.
2:17Ben FergusonYeah.
2:18Elon MuskAnd you're canvas.
2:20Ted CruzWow.
2:20Elon MuskI'm sure you would agree.
2:22Ted CruzSo a lot of folks have talked about like, like you can't miss. Yeah.
2:28Elon MuskThis is going any direction.
2:30Ted CruzA lot of the crazy expenditures, things like like 2 million bucks for sex change surgeries in Guatemala, an essential you know, transgendered mice and. And Sesame street in Iraq.
2:43Ted CruzA lot of that has gotten attention. But some of the stuff you've told me about, like, tell us about computer licenses and government agencies.
2:50Elon MuskYeah. So most of what Doge is finding, you don't need to be Sherlock Holmes. Okay. It's very obvious. Basic stuff. So in every government department, I say every. Because we've not yet found a single exception, there are far too many software licenses and media subscriptions, meaning many more software licenses and media subscriptions than there are humans in the department.
3:14Ted CruzLike you were saying, like an agency with 15,000 people might have 30,000 licenses.
3:17Elon MuskYes.
3:19Ted CruzAnd even of the 15,000 employees, a good chunk of them hadn't used the license, had never logged on or used the application.
3:27Elon MuskYes. We found entire situations of software licenses or media subscriptions where there were zero logins. So it had.
3:36Ted CruzAnd yet we were paying for it.
3:37Elon MuskYes. The government was paying for thousands of licenses of software or media subscriptions, and no one had ever logged in even once.
3:45Ted CruzOr, like credit cards, you found the same thing with government credit cards.
3:48Elon MuskWe found that there are twice as many credit cards as there are humans. And I still don't have a good explanation for why this is the case. And these are $10,000 limit cards.
3:59Elon MuskSo it's a lot of money.
4:01Ben FergusonIs it incompetence that you're finding, or is this like the biggest money laundering scheme in the history of the world that you're finding?
4:08Elon MuskLook, I think it's mostly. If you say, look, what's the waste to fraud ratio? In my opinion, it's like 80% waste, 20% fraud. But you do have these sort of gray areas.
4:21Ted CruzYeah.
4:22Ben FergusonExample.
4:23Elon MuskExample would be. So we saw a lot of payments going out of treasury that had no payment code and no explanation for the payment. And then we're. We're trying to figure out what that payment is.
4:37Elon MuskAnd we'd see that, okay, that contract was supposed to be shut off, but someone forgot to shut off that contract, and so the company kept getting money.
4:46Ted CruzWow.
4:47Elon MuskNow, is that waste or fraud?
4:50Ted CruzBoth.
4:50Ben FergusonBoth.
4:51Ted CruzYeah.
4:51Ben FergusonYeah. You're getting something you're not supposed to get.
4:55Elon MuskYou're not supposed to get it, but the government sent it to you, and nobody from the government asked for it back. Take, for example, the $1.9 billion given to Stacey Abrams.
5:06Elon MuskA fake NGO.
5:07Ted CruzUtter insanity.
5:08Ben FergusonExplain it.
5:12Ted CruzThat's just corrupt. I think that's paying off cronies at that point, 1,000%. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, she knew, like, when you get $2 billion you don't miss that.
5:21Ben FergusonThat's not an accident.
5:23Elon MuskAllegedly it was for like environmentally friendly appliances or something. And they've given like 100 appliances so far for $2 billion. It's a very expensive toaster when held
5:35Ted Cruzan appliance that's sub zero fridge. Boy, it's nice, right?
5:38Elon MuskObviously one of the biggest scam portholes we've uncovered, which is really crazy, is that the government can give money to a so called nonprofit with very few controls. And then that, and there's no auditing subsequently of that nonprofit.
5:58Elon MuskSo there's no. So this is with the, you know, 1.9 billion. Stacey Abrams. Who's, who's. They then give themselves extremely lavish, like insane salaries, expense everything to the, to the nonprofit.
6:11Elon MuskYou know, buy jets and homes and all sorts of things.
6:14Ted CruzLive like kings and queens.
6:15Elon MuskYes.
6:15Ted CruzOn the taxpayer dime.
6:17Elon MuskCorrect. You mentioned this is happening at scale. It's not just one or two. We're seeing this everywhere.
6:22Ted CruzNow. One of the things you told me about is crazy is what you call magic Money computers. Tell us about it, because I never heard of that until you brought that up.
6:32Elon MuskOkay. So you may think that these, that the government computers like all talk to each other, they synchronize, they add up what funds are going somewhere and it's, you know, it's coherent that, you know, there's.
6:48Elon MuskAnd that the numbers, for example, that you're presented as a senator are actually the real numbers.
6:53Ted CruzOne would think.
6:54Elon MuskOne would think they're not. Yeah, Okay. I mean they're not totally wrong, but they're probably off by 5% or 10% in some cases. So I call a Magic Money computer, any computer which can just make money out of thin air.
7:09Elon MuskBest Magic Money.
7:10Ted CruzSo how does that work?
7:11Elon MuskIt just issues payments.
7:13Ted CruzAnd you said there's something like 11 of these computers at treasury that are sending out trillions in payments.
7:19Elon MuskThey're mostly Treasury. Some are, but there's some at HHS, some at. There's one or two at State, there's some at DOD. I think we found out 14 Magic Money computers.
7:34Elon MuskThey just send money out of nothing.
7:37Ted CruzYou have an ability to see where leverage points are and how things actually happen. So I remember back, I think it was September, October of this year, before the election.
7:48Ted CruzWe didn't know who was going to win. And I was at your house in Austin, we were talking about it and you said, look, I don't want a job in Washington.
7:57Ted CruzAnd you said, all I want is the login for every computer. And I remember thinking at the time that sounded kind of weird, like I just didn't get it.
8:04Ted CruzAnd I have to say what's interesting on this, if I would have thought, like, okay, how do you reform government? Like, sort of the traditional way to think about it is, okay, give me an org chart.
8:15Ted CruzLet me sit down with the people who are running agencies. And what you saw immediately is to understand what's really going on. Get to the payment systems, get to the computers.
8:25Elon MuskYeah.
8:26Ted CruzLike, why are. Why is getting to the computer so critical to understanding what's actually happening?
8:35Elon MuskWell, the government is run by computers. So you've got essentially several hundred computers that effectively run the government. And if you want to know.
8:44Ted CruzDid you know that, Ben?
8:45Ben FergusonNo.
8:47Elon MuskYeah. So when somebody, like, even when the President issues an executive order, that's got to go through a whole bunch of people until ultimately it is implemented at a computer somewhere.
8:55Elon MuskAnd if you want to know what the situation is with the accounting and you're trying to reconcile accounting and get rid of waste and fraud, you must be able to analyze the computer databases.
9:04Elon MuskOtherwise you can't figure it out because all you're doing is asking a human, who will then ask another human, ask another human, and finally usually ask some contractor, will ask another contractor to do a query on the computer.
9:17Ted CruzWow.
9:18Elon MuskThat's how it actually works. So it's many layers deep. So the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers and see what's going on.
9:29Ben FergusonSo you.
9:30Elon MuskThat's what I call. That's like. That's right. When I sort of cryptically refer to reprogramming the matrix, you have to understand what's going on the computers. You have to reconcile the computer databases in order to identify the waste of fraud.
9:44Ted CruzI don't know that there was anyone in Congress who understood, certainly myself included, who understood the leverage that comes from the computer and the data in particular that. That Congress would think about.
9:59Ted CruzGive me a report on what your expenditures are rather than actually getting into the pipes. And I think that has been fascinating that it's let you uncover a bunch of crap that just nobody knew.
10:11Elon MuskYes. I mean, in order for money to go to event count, it's not like we're sending truckloads of cash all over the place. We're wiring money.
10:20Ted CruzRight.
10:20Elon MuskWe're sending money through the ACH system or through the SWIFT system. So in order for money to flow, it's going to flow electronically. So that's. That's what you need to look at.
10:28Elon MuskYou need to look at the, the actual electronic money flows and Tesla and
10:32Ted Cruzall your companies, you have accounting and you have every expenditure, you have it coded for what it's going for. Federal government doesn't work that way. They don't code with the money's going for.
10:40Elon MuskThey do now.
10:41Ted CruzBut they didn't.
10:41Elon MuskThey didn't.
10:43Ted CruzAnd, and like one of the things that, that you told me, you said if any company kept its books the way the federal government does, they'd arrest the officers and put them in jail.
10:51Elon MuskYes. If it was a public company, it would be delisted immediately, it would fail its ordered, and the officers of the company would be imprisoned. That's the level of healthyness in the federal government, unfortunately.
11:02Ted CruzIt's deliberately.
11:04Ben FergusonOr do you think this is confidence again?
11:06Elon MuskIt's 80%. It's 80% incompetence or, and 20% malice.
11:12Ben FergusonSo if you look at, if you look at Doge now and you look at the government and what you're finding, what percentage have you guys even gotten to and how much of it is Mars where you haven't even gotten there yet?
11:26Ben FergusonBecause there's so much you're finding out here. I mean, how many. You seem like a timeline guy when you say, all right, I want to get in there and get all these, you know, numbers and things.
11:34Ben FergusonHow far are we from the end game where you've seen it all, been able to process it all and fix it? I mean, are we years away, months away?
11:44Elon MuskNot years.
11:49Elon MuskI mean, I'm reasonably confident that we'll be able to get a trillion dollars of waste and fraud out and that, that meaning that it will have, we'll have a net savings in FY26, which starts in October, obviously, of a trillion dollars, provided we allowed to, we're allowed to continue and our progress is not impeded and we're very public about what we do.
12:12Ted CruzYeah, you put it on the website.
12:14Elon MuskI don't know how we could be more transparent. Literally every action we do, small or large, we put on the doge.gov website and we post on the X handle.
12:25Elon MuskAnd when people complain about it and they say, oh, you're doing something on cost usual, I'm like, well, which of
12:30Ted Cruzthese cost you do it in the daylight. Everyone knows exactly what you're doing.
12:33Elon MuskExtreme transparency. I don't think it's anything's been this transparent ever.
12:39Ted CruzSo five years ago you were a hero to the left. You were cool, you had electric cars, you had space. And in five years you could go
12:49Elon Muskto a party in Hollywood and not get dirty looks. Yeah. In fact. Yeah.
12:53Ted CruzAnd now you might not even get invited. Think it's invited.
12:56Elon MuskBut I don't know if I should go.
12:58Ted CruzAnd I don't think it's an exaggeration to say today after Donald Trump, the left hates you more than any person on earth.
13:07Elon MuskYes. I appear to be number two. I mean, if you judge by the various signs, it's derangement.
13:14Ted CruzIt's Trump derangement syndrome and Elon derangement syndrome. How is that for you? That's a little bit of whiplash of going from being like Mr. Cool to the devil incarnate in just a couple of years.
13:25Ted CruzIs that, is that kind of weird to experience that transformation?
13:28Elon MuskYes.
13:29Ted CruzWhy do they hate you so much?
13:31Elon MuskWell, because we're clearly over the target. If those was ineffective, if we were not actually getting rid of a bunch of waste and fraud and a bunch of that fraud.
13:43Elon MuskI mean, the fraud, Reese, we're seeing is overwhelmingly on the left. I mean, it's not zero on the right, but these NGOs are almost all left wing NGOs that are being funded, for example.
13:55Ted CruzYep.
13:57Elon MuskSo they, they hate me because DOGE is being effective and DOGE is getting rid of a lot of waste. Before that, they were. That people on the left were taking advantage of that.
14:08Elon MuskThat's, that's, that's what it comes down to. And, and the, the, the single biggest thing that they're, that they're worried about is that DOGE is, is going to turn off fraudulent payments of entitlements.
14:21Elon MuskI mean, everything from Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, disability, Small Business Administration loans, Turn them off to illegals. This is the crux of the matter. Okay. This is the thing that, why they really hit my guts and want me to die.
14:41Ted CruzAnd do you think that's billions? Hundreds of billions? What do you think the scale is of that?
14:46Elon MuskI think across the country, it's well north of 100 billion, maybe 200 billion. So by using entitlements fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants.
15:03Ted CruzAnd buy voters.
15:05Elon MuskAnd buy voters. Exactly. And basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and will vote overwhelmingly Democrat, as has been demonstrated in California.
15:21Elon MuskThis is, it's an election strategy. Yes.
15:25Ted CruzIt's power.
15:25Elon MuskYes. And it doesn't take much to turn the swing states blue. I mean, often a swing state might be won by 10, 20,000 votes.
15:32Ted CruzSure.
15:33Elon MuskSo the Dems can bring in 200,000 illegals and over Time, get them legalized. Not. Not counting any cheating that takes place. Because there is some cheating. But even without cheating, if you bring in illegals that are 10x the voter differential in a swing state, it will no longer be a swing state.
15:52Elon MuskAnd the Dems will win all the swing states. Just a matter of time and America will be permanent deep blue socialist state. The House, the Senate, the presidency and the Supreme Court will all go hardcore them.
16:09Elon MuskThey will then further cement that by bringing in even more aliens. So you just. You can't vote your way out of it. Their objective is to make it one party socialist state.
16:19Elon MuskAnd it'll be much worse than California because at least California is mitigated by the fact that someone can leave California.
16:23Ted CruzYou can go to Texas.
16:24Elon MuskYeah, exactly. You're gonna make everywhere California.
16:28Ted CruzBut worse, by the way, the middle of the pandemic, I spent 45 minutes on the phone with Elon. He was still in California. I was walking my dog, Snowflake and trying to convince you, come to Texas.
16:39Ted CruzThe commies in California can't stand you. We love you, we want you here. And you didn't quite go then, but you went not that long afterwards.
16:47Elon MuskI mean, the COVID actions almost killed Tesla because every other auto plant in the country was allowed to open, but ours, which was in California, was not allowed to open.
16:58Ted CruzWow. Wow.
17:00Elon MuskSo they almost killed Tesla.
17:02Ted CruzSo as a. As a personal matter, do you ever regret it? Like five years ago you go to the Oscars and Mr. Cool and now you're. You've got death threats every day.
17:12Ted CruzLike, do you.
17:13Elon MuskWell, these days the Oscars are boring. I wouldn't want to go, God bless
17:17Ted Cruzthe movies they nominate no one on earth has ever seen. Like, like, could they actually nominate a movie that human beings go watch?
17:23Elon MuskI mean, the. How many great movies have come out in the last several years? Very few.
17:28Ted CruzDepressingly few.
17:29Elon MuskYeah. Very few last Oscars came and went. I didn't watch it. There's nothing to see.
17:33Ted CruzI was sad that Gene Hackman just passed away because Unforgiven was spectacular. But that was a long time ago.
17:40Ben FergusonYou've mentioned today here and before, about the possibility of someone wanting to take you out dealing with the death threats we see.
17:50Elon MuskIt's not in my imagination. You could just look on social media.
17:52Ben FergusonYeah, but like, is, is it because.
17:56Elon MuskYeah.
17:56Ted CruzAnd look, I'm, I'm very familiar with it.
17:58Elon MuskAnd they've got signs. They're people with science and demonstrations saying that I need to die.
18:03Ted CruzDo you think? Are these just whack. Jobs or do you think there are
18:08Elon Muskhopefully foreign, not sane people?
18:10Ted CruzDo you think there are foreign entities behind this? Do you think they're domestic entities behind the, the threats and also the attacks to Twitter? Not Twitter, Bob T. Tesla.
18:19Ted CruzI mean, you know, you're getting Tesla's charging stations lit on fire. Do you think that's organized and paid for?
18:27Elon MuskYes, at least some of it is organized and paid for, I think by domestic, you know, basically left wing organizations in America funded by left wing billionaires, essentially.
18:44Ted CruzIs it like Act Blue or what?
18:45Elon MuskAct Blue is one of them, you know, was Arabella. You know, the classic. It's funded by the, you know, the, the blue. Basically the left wing NGO cabal.
19:00Ben FergusonHow big of a thread is this to like what you build at Tesla? I mean, I remember when Teslas came out, it was people that they didn't want to have gas cars.
19:08Ben FergusonA lot of it was environmental reasons. I jokingly said I was like a Texas guy. I'm always going to have to. That burns gas. My kids, now all three of my boys think that, that Teslas are awesome.
19:20Ben FergusonThe cybertruck is the car they want their dad to buy. Which I laugh because I never could have imagined that five years ago. And now I'm looking at, well, we're
19:29Ted Cruzat the White House and the President's Tesla is parked, which is the fullest damn thing.
19:33Ben FergusonBut I mean, you've changed a generation. When you look at my kids are 6 and 8 and they're going, dad, buy a cyber truck. And I'm considering it. That's a full circle in a weird way.
19:44Elon MuskYeah. Well, I do have this theory that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. So yeah, it seems often to be true. You see, like what twist or turn of fate would generate the highest ratings if we were a TV show.
20:01Elon MuskWhat twist or turn of fate would generate the highest ratings? There's a good chance that happens.
20:06Ted CruzWell, I will say if, if ActBlue and Arabella Network is a huge scam.
20:11Elon MuskNext level.
20:12Ted CruzDo you think it's foreign money? Chinese money? Where do, where do you think the money in ActBlue is coming from? How do you figure that out?
20:18Elon MuskWell, it's not coming from the, from a whole bunch of, from a groundswell of public support. Because when individual donors looked at in ActBlue eventually turn out to be like die hard Republicans.
20:30Elon MuskRight. People have never given money in their life. So you're going to track down a bunch of these people where it says, oh, I gave $16,000 and they're like, I didn't give $16,000.
20:38Elon MuskWe talking about this is. Well, if those conferences mine found themselves on the list, they're like.
20:46Ted CruzSo that's if it can actually be shown that they are funding firebombing of Tesla charging stations. That's objectively a criminal act that, that is funding terrorist activity. And the statutes make clear that an incendiary device qualify.
21:01Elon MuskSo that's down is a terrorist activity. Yeah.
21:04Ted CruzLet me ask AI, in 10 years, how is life going to be different because of AI for, for just a normal person?
21:16Elon MuskWell, 10 years is a long time. In 10 years, probably AI could do anything better than a human can cognitively. Probably almost. I think in 10 years, based on the current rate of improvement, AI will be smarter than the smartest human.
21:36Elon MuskThere will also be a massive number of robots, so humanoid robots.
21:41Ted CruzBy the way, I gotta ask, how come your robots look so much like the creepy robots for my robot? Was that intentional or just.
21:50Ben FergusonI was hoping he was gonna say
21:51Elon Muskyeah, just to mess with you. It's not meant to look like any prior robot. And we'll iterate the design and you'll be able to have a lot of the robot parts of cosmetic, you'll be able to switch out the kind of snap on cosmetic parts of the robot, make it look like something else if you're dying.
22:13Elon MuskSo there'll be ultimately billions of humanoid robots, all cars will be self roving
22:21Ted Cruzin 10 years.
22:24Elon MuskIn 10 years, probably 90% of miles driven will be autonomous.
22:30Ted CruzHuh, wow, that fast?
22:32Elon MuskYeah. In five years, probably 50% of all miles driven will be autonomous.
22:38Ted CruzNow if AI will be smarter than any person, how many jobs go away because of that? And what do people do if you've got billions of people that are losing their jobs like that?
22:50Ted CruzLot of people are understandably freaked out about that.
22:53Elon MuskWell, goods and services will become close to free. So it's not as though people will be wanting in terms of goods and services.
23:06Ted CruzSo why is that? Why are goods and services free in an AI world or close to free?
23:13Elon MuskWell, you have, I don't know, tens of billions of robots. They will make you anything or provide any service you want for basically next to nothing. It's not that people will have a lower standard of living, they'll have actually a much higher standard of living.
23:34Elon MuskThe challenge will be fulfillment. How do you drive fulfillment and meaning in life?
23:43Ted CruzIs Skynet real like you get the apocalyptic visions of AI? How real is the prospect of killer robots annihilating humanity?
23:55Elon Musk20% likely, maybe 10% on what time
23:59Ted Cruzframe
24:02Elon Muskfive to 10 years.
24:04Ted CruzSo soon you see a world where that's possible.
24:09Elon MuskYeah, but I mean, you can look at it like the glasses, 80 to 90% full, meaning like 80% likely will have extreme prosperity for all.
24:20Ted CruzNow, I guess my view we're in a race to win AI. We're in a race with China. And my view is if they're going to be killer robots, I'd rather they be American killer robots than Chinese.
24:32Ted CruzHow likely are we winning right now? Is America winning right now? And how likely is America to win the race for AI vis a vis
24:40Elon MuskChina or anyone else for the next few years? I think America is likely to win. Then it will be a function of who controls the AI chip fabrication, the factories that make the AI chips.
24:55Elon MuskWho controls them if they are controlled. If more of them are controlled by China, then China will win more.
25:03Ted CruzThe factories that are making the AI chips, you think that will determine it?
25:07Elon MuskYes.
25:09Ted CruzAnd how are we doing versus China on that front?
25:13Elon MuskWell, right now, almost all the advanced AI chip factories, they call them fabs, are in Taiwan.
25:23Ted CruzAnd what if China invades 29 miles away from. Yeah. What happens if China, China invades Taiwan? What happens to the world?
25:33Elon MuskWell, if they were to invade in the near term, the world would be cut off from advanced AI chips. Currently, 100% of advanced AI chips are made in Taiwan.
25:45Ben FergusonHow fast could we put that online in America? And how important is that for national security?
25:50Elon MuskI think it's essential for national security. And we're not doing enough.
25:54Ted CruzYou're 53 years old. I'm 118 days older than you, by the way. What the hell have I done in my life?
26:00Ben FergusonI know, right?
26:02Ted Cruz53 years old.
26:03Elon MuskYou're pretty.
26:03Ted CruzWell, well.
26:06Elon MuskSo 71 was a great year.
26:08Ted CruzAnd I was December 70s. I was just, Just right before you were the summer of 71.
26:15Elon MuskI was born 69 days after 420.
26:17Ted CruzWow. I, I did ask then.
26:20Ben FergusonThis is true.
26:21Ted CruzLook, it was true.
26:22Ben FergusonAll right.
26:24Ted CruzI did ask then. Should I show up and pull up a joint and say, can we beat Rogan's views? But. But I was pretty sure it might cause a scandal if we.
26:34Elon MuskIt just turned out to be like a chocolate cigar. Yeah.
26:39Ted CruzLet me ask you if, if today was your last day on Earth.
26:42Elon MuskYeah. What?
26:43Ted CruzWhat? I'm not suggesting it's going to be, but if it were, what do you think your biggest legacy would be of everything you've done 100 years from now? What do you think people would remember if, if, if, if it were zero to Today.
26:55Ben FergusonAnd will you ever go to space
26:58Elon Muskin the. In the distant future? 100 or 1000 years ago, if SpaceX got humans to Mars, that's what they would remember me for.
27:08Ted CruzAll right, final set of questions. Who's the smartest guy you've ever met? You hang out with some brilliant people. Like, when you look. What's a CEO you look at other than yourself?
27:18Ted CruzWhat CEO do you say? Damn, that guy's good.
27:23Elon MuskLarry Elson's very smart, so I'll say Larry Ellison's one of the smartest people. You know, Larry Page. I mean, there are a lot of people that are very smart.
27:36Elon MuskIt's hard to say. Like, you know, I think to some degree, smart is as smart does.
27:42Ted CruzSo
27:46Elon Muskwhat have they done that is difficult and significant? Jeff Bezos has done a lot of difficult and significant things. I mean, there are a lot of smart humans. I call them smart for a human.
28:07Elon MuskA lot of people who are in the smart for a human category.
28:10Ted CruzAll right, final lightning round. Star wars or Star Trek?
28:16Elon MuskThe first movie I saw in the theater was Star wars. So I think it had a profound effect on me. I was six years old, I think. Imagine if best movie you ever see in a theater is Star Wars.
28:28Elon MuskThat's gonna blow your mind.
28:29Ted CruzBest Star wars movie.
28:33Elon MuskEmpire Strikes Back.
28:35Ted CruzThe only objectively right answer. I stood in line three hours with my dad to see it on opening day. Kirk or Picard? I like them both, but Kirk, again, objectively right answer.
28:46Ted CruzBy the way, James T. Kirk is a Republican and Picard is a Democrat. And the left gets very mad when I say that. Yeah, best Star Trek movie.
28:57Elon MuskI mean, the original. The first Star Trek movie.
28:59Ted CruzMaybe now that's in the.
29:01Elon MuskOkay, Wrath of Khan. Both Wrath of Cons were pretty good, but, yeah, the original Wrath of Khan.
29:10Ted CruzRicardo Montalban. Revenge is a dish best served cold. It is very cold in space. Although I will say Wrath of Khan is objectively the right answer. But. But 4 is a sleeper.
29:23Ted CruzWhen they go back to San Francisco and go find the whales and, you know, Scotty picks up. Picks up the mouth and talks to it. Then goes a keyboard.
29:32Ted CruzHow quaint. That's a sleeper. All right, last question. Did Han shoot first?
29:40Ben FergusonHuh?
29:42Elon MuskIt seemed like he shot second.
29:46Ted CruzThis is verdict. And by the way, I apologize. Ben. So Ben was a jock and played tennis at Ole Miss. And so. So occasionally when. When we geek out a little.
29:54Ben FergusonI love watching y' all geek out
29:55Elon Muskover there first, though, because the guy,
29:57Ben Fergusonhe's still on the question.
29:58Ted CruzI love.
29:59Elon MuskHe must have the alien missed his blaster shot? So why do you miss his blaster shot? Must have been because he got shot first. Now he's missing a point blank blaster shot if, unless they get knocked off kill.
30:09Ted CruzBut it's a question of real, which is, is Han Solo simply a hero or an anti hero? And so I'm in the Han shot first category, I think. I don't like sanitized stories.
30:20Elon MuskHe would have had to have shot first because otherwise why, why would the alien miss a point blank range?
30:25Ben FergusonAre you ever going to go to outer space? Is that thing in your life goals?
30:28Elon MuskYeah, I'd like to go to Mars at some point. And people said, do I want to die on Mars? And I say yes, just not on impact.
30:36Ted CruzNow that's a very good answer. The astronauts on the space station, are they political prisoners?
30:44Elon MuskSome of them are.
30:45Ted CruzBecause, because you could have given him a ride back and Joe Biden said no, purely for politics.
30:52Elon MuskYeah, I mean, you know, there's been some debate about this online, but the thing is that it was very, a very high level decision. So it wasn't really even a NASA decision.
31:02Elon MuskIt was just that the Biden White House did not want to have someone who was pro Trump rescuing astronauts right before the election. So they pushed it.
31:13Ted CruzWell, if you're one of those astronauts, you gotta be pretty pissed off about that.
31:17Elon MuskWell, if they're a Democrat, yes.
31:20Ted CruzRepublican, yes.
31:21Elon MuskBut if the Democrat like everything's fine, fair enough. So I think one of them is a Republican Democrat. So it depends on which one you ask.
31:29Ted CruzWhat year does man first step set foot on Mars?
31:34Elon MuskI think the soonest would be 29.
31:38Ted Cruz29, yes.
31:40Elon MuskAnd I don't think it's more than two to four years beyond that.
31:44Ted CruzAnd that's not an unmanned, that's, that's a human being putting his foot on the surface.
31:50Elon MuskYes. Best case would be 29.
31:53Ted CruzAnd what do you, what do you put the odds of finding either alien life or evidence of alien life?
32:01Elon MuskI don't think we're gonna find aliens.
32:02Ted CruzOkay, but do we find ruins? Do we find remnants?
32:07Elon MuskWe may, we may find the ruins of a long dead alien civilization. That's possible. And we may find subterranean microbial life. That's possible.
32:16Ted CruzAll right. If man lands on Mars in 29, how soon after that do you land on Mars?
32:24Elon MuskRemains to be seen. I'm not sure. The important thing is that we build a self sustaining city on Mars as quickly as possible. The, the key threshold is when that city can continue to grow.
32:41Elon MuskContinue to prosper even when the supply ships from Earth stop coming. At that point, even if something were to happen on Earth, it might not be World War 3, but it might be that a bad virus.
32:58Elon MuskYeah, it might not be anything. Those things is like say civilization could die with a bang or a whimper. It may be that civilization dies with a whimper rather than a bang or and simply loses the ability to send ships to Mars.
33:11Elon MuskSo you obviously need Mars to become self sustaining and be able to grow by itself before the resupply ships from Earth stop coming. That is the critical civilizational threshold beyond which the probable lifespan of civilization is much greater.
33:29Ted CruzAnd how close are we technologically to be able to do that? To have a self sustaining settlement on the surface of Mars?
33:38Elon MuskI think it can be done in 20 years.
33:41Ted CruzBut it would take 20 years. So we're not in 29, we're not there. What are we missing? What are the big technologies we don't have?
33:48Elon MuskA few people running around the surface in a hostile environment is not going to make it self sustaining. So you're going to need on the order of a million people, maybe a million tons of cargo.
33:57Elon MuskSo.
33:57Ted CruzBut you think we could have a million people on Mars in 20 years?
34:01Elon MuskYes.
34:02Ted CruzAnd what, what's the technology we're missing right now? When you think about a million people on Mars, do we have the ability to get water, to get food, to, to keep them safe?
34:11Ted CruzI mean what, what do we need to make that happen?
34:14Elon MuskWell, you need to recreate the entire base of industry of Earth. So you know, we're here at the top of a massive pyramid of industry that starts with mining a vast array of materials.
34:30Elon MuskThose materials going through hundreds of steps of refinement. We grow food, obviously, we grow trees. We make things out of the trees. There's, you know, you've got, you've got to build all that on Mars.
34:44Elon MuskAnd Mars is a hostile environment. It's, you know, it sometimes gets above zero on a warm summer day near the equator on Mars, really it's quite cold.
34:56Ted CruzHow do you prep for that?
34:57Elon MuskWell, in the beginning on Mars you have to have a life support habitation module. Right. Like you need, you can't just live outdoors. You can't breathe the air.
35:07Ted CruzLike a dome you think is likely.
35:09Elon MuskYeah, glass domes type of thing.
35:12Ted CruzHave you identified a location on Mars that is likely to be ideal for habitat?
35:19Elon MuskWhat might be Arcadia Planetaria is one of the good options. That's one of my daughters is named Arcadia after that.
35:30Ted CruzAnd what makes that attractive?
35:33Elon MuskMy other son's middle name is Aries. Mars.
35:38Ben FergusonYou've been thinking about this for a long time if you're naming your kids around it.
35:41Elon MuskMy eldest kid is middle name is essentially Mars.
35:45Ben FergusonWhen did you get the dream?
35:46Elon MuskLike, I mean, it's 20 now, turning 21 soon.
35:50Ben FergusonThis is a decades old.
35:52Elon MuskYeah.
35:52Ben FergusonDream.
35:53Ted CruzSo like when you were 10, did you look up and say, I'm going to Mars?
35:56Elon MuskNo, no. I read a lot of science fiction books and program computers, but the first, funnily, if the first video game that I sold was a space video game called Blastar,
36:22Ted CruzAnd you've managed everything you've touched, has been an extraordinary success.
36:29Elon MuskYeah,
36:31Ted Cruzlook, I mean, that's just objectively right. So what has led to that? Because there are other smart people that, that's not true. And they gaze at their navel and they don't do anything.
36:39Ted CruzSo what, what do you do differently that makes you so effective?
36:43Elon MuskWell, I suppose I have a philosophy of curiosity. I want to find out the nature of the universe, understand the universe. And in order to do that, we have to travel to other planets, see other star systems, maybe other galaxies, find perhaps other alien civilizations, or at least the remnants of alien civilizations.
37:10Elon MuskGain a better understanding of where is this universe going? Where did it come from? And what questions do we not yet know to ask about the answer that is the universe.
37:20Ted CruzSo let's go back 25 years. Late 90s, you're at PayPal. How do you turn PayPal into the success it was, which then helped launch you to the next one and the next.
37:31Elon MuskYeah, so I studied physics and economics in college, which is a good foundation for understanding how the economy works and how the, how reality works. And then was going to do a PhD at Stanford in advanced ultracapacitors, actually as a potential means of energy storage for electric transport.
38:00Elon MuskPut that on hold to start an Internet company. Essentially came to the conclusion that the Internet was one of those rare things. And I could either watch it happen while a grad student or participate.
38:14Elon MuskAnd I figured I'd always go back to grad school. You know, grad school is going to be kind of the same. But I, I, I couldn't bear the thought of just watching the Internet happen.
38:22Elon MuskSo I wanted to be a part of building it. So I created an Internet company. We did the first maps, directions, yellow pages, white pages on the Internet. I actually wrote the first version of software just by myself in 95.
38:37Elon MuskAnd we ended up selling that to Compaq Texas Company, I guess for about $300 million in cash, about four years after I graduated.
38:50Ted CruzWow.
38:51Elon MuskSo I should say, just to preface that I. I graduated with about a hundred thousand dollars in student debt, so it wasn't.
38:57Ted CruzYeah, you and me both.
38:58Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
39:00Ted CruzWhere's my 300 million?
39:01Ben FergusonI'm right.
39:01Ted CruzI know.
39:03Elon MuskAnd when I first arrived in North America, I arrived with $2,500, a bag of books and a bag of clothes.
39:10Ted CruzAll right, so you sell the company for 300 million. How much does that change your life?
39:14Elon MuskWell, I got $21 million. Blackjack and. But I wanted to do more on the Internet, so started a company called X.com, which merged with a company called Confinity, which is Peter Thiel and Max Levchin.
39:33Elon MuskYep. And the combined company was actually at first still called x dot com, but we later changed the name of the company to PayPal because of all the name changes.
39:44Elon MuskIt's kind of confusing, but the company that people know as. Know as PayPal today was actually. I filed those incorporation documents for that company.
39:52Ted CruzInteresting.
39:52Elon MuskYeah.
39:54Ted CruzWell, and as you know, Peter Thiel and I were buddies back in the mid-90s before he went and did any of this. But, you know, I became friends with him when he was a corporate lawyer in New York and just sort of a young libertarian with a lot of dreams.
40:07Ted CruzSo it's been a heck of a journey.
40:09Elon MuskYeah, yeah. And now obviously Peter was involved in a coup. You know, we had a little sort of knifing in the Senate situation where, you know, they did coup me at PayPal.
40:26Elon MuskI kind of.
40:27Ted CruzNow, did you all make peace after that?
40:29Elon MuskYeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I was doing a lot of sort of risky moves that I think ultimately would have been successful. But I then went on a two week trip, which was a dual money raising trip and honeymoon instead.
40:45Elon MuskNot done my honeymoon earlier in the year, so I was raising money while doing it, doing honeymoon, but I was kind of awake.
40:51Ben FergusonHow'd that go over, by the way?
40:54Elon MuskIt worked.
40:55Ben FergusonIt worked. There you go.
40:56Elon MuskIt worked. I raised money.
40:57Ted CruzYeah, yeah.
40:58Elon MuskAnd we had a honeymoon.
40:59Ted CruzThere you go.
41:00Elon MuskSo, yeah, but you don't want to be away from the battle when things are scary. So I was not there to assuage the concerns of the troops. And anyway, we patched things up and have been friends nonetheless.
41:21Elon MuskAnd these days I like to stay at his house and stuff. So we're friends. And he. He's also invested in. In most of my companies.
41:29Ted CruzAll right, so 2002, you. You start SpaceX. Like, how do you start a rocket company? Like, what's the first day where you're like I want to make rockets and I want to go to Mars.
41:38Ted CruzLike what, what do you do on day one?
41:40Elon MuskSo I think you have to start with a, some sort of philosophical premise in order to have, in order for the, in order to be, in order to be highly motivated you have to have some philosophical foundation.
41:57Elon MuskIn my case it was that we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the nature of the universe. And in order to expand consciousness we need to go beyond one planet.
42:17Elon MuskIf we're on one planet there's too much risk. You know, hopefully Earth civilization prospers very far into the future, but it may not. There's always some risk that we are, we self annihilate through nuclear war or that there's a big meteor that takes us out like the dinosaurs.
42:33Elon MuskYep, there's always some risk if all your eggs are in one basket. So it's going to be better if we're multi planet species and then once we're multi planet species that the next step would be to be multi stellar and have civilization among on many different star Systems.
42:51Elon MuskSo in 2001 I didn't think that I could, I didn't think I could sell a rocket company so I thought I'd take some of the money from PayPal. In that case I think it was about $180 million after tax, something like that.
43:07Elon MuskAnd I thought I don't need $180 million so I'll spend a bunch of it on a philanthropic Mars mission to get the public excited about going back to Mars or going to Mars I should say.
43:24Elon MuskYeah, Mars was always going to be the destination after the moon. Right. In fact, if you told people in 1969 that it would be 2025 and we've not even gone back to the
43:34Ted Cruzmoon, let alone, it's hard to believe,
43:36Elon Musklet alone Mars, they'd be like, what happened? Did civilization collapse?
43:40Ben FergusonStop?
43:40Elon MuskYeah, like it would be incomprehensible that we've not been to Mars by now. If you told people this after landing on the moon in 69, why do
43:49Ted Cruzyou think in 50 years America never went back to the moon?
43:53Elon MuskWell, we destroyed the Saturn V rocket that was, that could take people to the moon and had the space shuttle which could only go to low Earth orbit. And then there really hasn't been anything to replace any.
44:06Elon MuskNo vehicle has been made since then that can go to the moon or to Mars until the SpaceX Starship rocket.
44:13Ted CruzYeah.
44:14Elon MuskSo can't go to Mars if you don't have the ride.
44:17Ted CruzSo I remember you and I first met in 2013 when I was a brand new baby senator and I was still down in the basement office. They stick freshmen senators in a basement office.
44:29Ted CruzKind of like hazening.
44:30Elon MuskYeah. I was about to say it sounds
44:31Ted Cruzlike there are 100 Senate offices, but for six months you stay in the basement place. It's like wearing beans.
44:37Ben FergusonThey want, you know, where you're supposed to be.
44:39Ted CruzI gotta say, now, 13 years into it, I think there's a lot of wisdom to doing that. But you were down in the basement office and I remember you were coming and sitting down with SpaceX and at the time the Air Force was not letting you all bid to launch satellites.
44:52Ted CruzAnd so you were coming and saying, look, we got a company, I think we can do a really good job of this. And yet we're locked out of this.
44:58Ted CruzIt's a little amazing to think the journey SpaceX has gone from then to now.
45:05Elon MuskYes, it's hard to believe that this is all real because originally consistent with my belief that we need to become a multi planet species, I thought the only way to do that would be through NASA.
45:18Elon MuskAnd I think I thought, well, if I can just get the public excited about Mars, then they'll do a mission to Mars. And so initially my thought was to have to send a small greenhouse with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel, then land at the greenhouse, hydrate the seeds, and you see these sort of money shot.
45:37Elon MuskThe money shot would be green plants on a red background. I also recently learned that money shot has a different meaning in some other arenas. But yeah, I'm glad you did.
45:50Ted CruzVery different story.
45:52Elon MuskBut what I'm trying to say is the captivating shot would be the green plants on a red background and that hopefully that would, if we did something like that, that would get the public excited about Mars, that would increase NASA's budget, and then we could send people to Mars.
46:07Ben FergusonYour dream was NASA to do this?
46:08Elon MuskYes.
46:09Ben FergusonNot you? No.
46:10Elon MuskThe original plan was literally to take a bunch of the money from PayPal and I guess by some people's definition waste it with no, no profit on a nonprofit thing.
46:25Elon MuskI wanted to spend a whole bunch of my money for free to get NASA's budget to be bigger so we could go to friggin Mars.
46:30Ted CruzRight.
46:30Ben FergusonWow.
46:31Elon MuskThat's what I wanted.
46:33Ben FergusonSo that was the Holy grail.
46:34Elon MuskThat's what I want.
46:35Ted CruzI was like, so when did you change? Why?
46:38Elon MuskThat's what I wanted to know.
46:39Ted CruzWhen? When did it strike you? Okay, you're going to have to do
46:42Elon Muskthis if you want. I tell you, it gets crazier. All right, it gets crazier. So, so then I couldn't afford any of the US Rockets because, as you know, the US Rockets are way too expensive.
46:49Elon MuskThe Boeing, Lockheed rocket. Lucky Rockets are crazy. Money I didn't have. I didn't Even, even with 180 million, there's no way I could have afforded.
46:55Ben FergusonHow much were they back then?
46:56Elon MuskWell, the, the, with, with the additional stage to get to Mars, it would have been about like 80 million. So technically I could have afforded one of them, but I wanted to do two in case one of them didn't work.
47:09Ted CruzYeah.
47:10Elon MuskSo. And then I didn't have enough money for that, and I was sort of prepared to, you know, I don't know, waste half the money. And I figured if I had 90 million left, that'd be fine, you know, but ideally, not all of it.
47:24Elon MuskSo I went to Russia twice to try to buy ICBMs.
47:29Ted CruzInteresting.
47:29Ben FergusonHow'd that go? And who do you call?
47:33Elon MuskThe Russian rocket forces?
47:35Ted CruzDo they sell ICBMs? Does that work?
47:37Ben FergusonYeah, you got to tell us a story then I want to know who has it.
47:42Elon MuskTurns out you can buy anything in Russia. Yeah, I, I like.
47:46Ben FergusonPlease walk me down that. I want to know how you made that phone call and when you get there, how did that work?
47:52Elon MuskAnd what do you tell your friends? Yeah, listen, I'm, I'm going to rush advice in my CBMs. I, I might not return, you know, depends on the situation.
48:00Ben FergusonLiterally.
48:02Elon MuskYeah, so I guess slightly less insane when you, when you understand that the Russians had to demolish a bunch of their ICBMs because of, you know, salt talks. Like, basically an agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce the total number of icbm.
48:22Ben FergusonSure.
48:22Elon MuskRussia was actually obligated to scrap a bunch of their ICBMs. So you're talking the very biggest ICBMs. You could convert those into a rocket at an additional stage and send something to Mars.
48:33Ted CruzSo those are big enough with one more stage to get to Mars.
48:37Elon MuskTo send a small payload to Mars.
48:38Ted CruzYeah.
48:39Elon MuskSo the SS18.
48:41Ted CruzSo you try to buy CBMs. Do you succeed or no? Or do you figure out you got to build your own instead?
48:46Elon MuskThey kept raising the price on me, so. Because I figured, like, look, they got to throw these things in scrapyard anyway. You should get a really good deal. Yeah, right.
48:59Elon MuskSo the price started out at 4 million. Then the next conversation they were at 8 million. Then the next conversation they Were at like 19 million. And I'm like, this is before we
49:09Ted Cruzsigned a contract, by the way. Was there another bidder? Was there another bidder or were you the only one trying to buy them?
49:14Elon MuskI think. I don't know if there were other bids, but they didn't mention any other bids. Yeah, but I was like, man, if the price is increasing this much before the contract signed, I'm really going to get fleeced after the contract.
49:24Elon MuskYeah, so. So I got pretty frustrated there, actually. In some cases. We got into, like, shouting matches in Moscow. Some guy's shouting at me in Russian. I'm shouting back at him
49:43Ted Cruzreally badly,
49:44Elon Muskyou know, I'm like, so you are all.
49:46Ben FergusonI mean, you're all in.
49:51Elon MuskIn Moscow. Yeah. So, man, I should have recorded that. That would have been wonderful.
49:58Ben FergusonHow many days were you there negotiating that? First time? I mean, was this, like, ongoing?
50:02Elon MuskYeah, yeah. This, this took place. These conversations took place over probably six months or so.
50:07Ted CruzWow.
50:09Elon MuskSo. And then the final trip there was with the. With. Was with Mike Griffin, who later became NASA administrator. I actually realized in the course of this that my original premise was wrong, that America actually has plenty of will to go to Mars, but just needs a way to Mars that is affordable and that doesn't break the budget.
50:37Ted CruzAs you know, we couldn't even get to the space station. We needed the Russians to get us to our own space station.
50:41Elon MuskThat was embarrassing.
50:42Ted CruzIt really was pitiful.
50:44Elon MuskI'm not sure most Americans, though, just how much we were being fleeced. Like, I think they got up to like $90 million a seat.
50:49Ted CruzYeah.
50:50Ben FergusonWow.
50:50Elon MuskYeah. For a seat that cost them like 10.
50:52Ted CruzThat was pre doge, obviously, but it was the only.
50:56Elon MuskIt was before SpaceX. But $90 million a seat for a seat that cost them 10 million is high.
51:03Ben FergusonYeah, it's a lot of money.
51:05Elon MuskYeah.
51:06Ted CruzSo a few months ago, you and I were down in Boca Chica with the President for a starship launch. And. And it is incredible what you built in Boca Chica.
51:15Ted CruzYou know, five years ago, it was an empty beach at the southern tip of Texas sandbar.
51:20Elon MuskYeah.
51:20Ted CruzAnd it's now a city and a factory where you're building a rocket ship a month with incredible precision. But one of the things you said to me when we were down there that really stood out to me is you said your philosophy on intellectual property.
51:34Ted CruzI've talked to lots of CEOs. They're like, we fight to guard our IP. And. And you had a very different approach. What, what's. What's Your view of IP patents for the week?
51:45Elon MuskPatents of. For those who innovate slowly.
51:47Ted CruzI, I literally do not know anyone else in business who would say something like that. Like, like it was a startling. And, and, and, and what Elon said down there is, he said, look, this stuff, I assume everyone will steal everything, but by the time they steal it will be five generations beyond and it won't matter.
52:02Elon MuskYes, at Tesla we actually open sourced a lot of patents. So we said our patents are, anyone can use them for free.
52:09Ben FergusonReally?
52:10Elon MuskYeah. We only do patents at Tesla to avoid patent trolls causing trouble. So we'll try to look ahead, say, okay, patent trolls are going to file patents to block certain things.
52:23Elon MuskWe'll file patents and then open source patent. Make it free. I mean it when I say patents for the week. Now there are a few cases in, say with pharmaceuticals where it might cost you a billion dollars to do a phase three trial, but then subsequently the drug is very cheap to manufacture.
52:40Elon MuskSo cases. There are some, in my opinion, which is massively reduce what can be patented and say. Because the whole point of patenting is to maximize innovation, not inhibit it.
52:52Elon MuskAnd in my opinion, it's maybe a controversial opinion. Most patents inhibit innovation, they do not help it. But there are cases I want to do want to single out cases like where, such AS a phase 3 clinical trial that might cost a billion dollars, but then the drugs thereafter cost a few dollars to manufacturer.
53:11Elon MuskAnd if you can then immediately copy those drugs for a few dollars, no one will pay for the billion dollars.
53:15Ted CruzIt's a free rider problem.
53:16Elon MuskFree rider problem. Yeah, exactly. So you have to address the free rider problem, but other than that, there should be no patents. The ideas are easy.
53:23Ben FergusonYou want ideas to flow maximum to people to get there faster and do things bigger.
53:29Elon MuskThe idea is the easy part. The hard execution is the hard part. As the old saying goes, it's 1% inspiration, if not less than 1% and 99% perspiration.
53:39Ted CruzBut I'll say the perspiration part you're really damn good at. Also because you're making, you know, the companies you're building are actually building stuff. They're building cars, they're building spaceships, they're building things that if they don't work, it's a real problem.
53:54Ted CruzAnd, and yeah, the precision you manufacture things with, how do you get that level of precision? How do you get, how do you build a culture? You're not, you're amazing at thinking outside the box.
54:05Ted CruzBut, but what's interesting is you're you may even be better at execution, which is, how do you execute so effectively?
54:13Elon MuskWell, I take a physics first principles approach to everything. It's not as though I wanted to in source manufacturing, it's just that I was unable to outsource it effectively.
54:25Elon MuskSo the idea at the beginning of Tesla was that we would outsource almost all the manufacturing, but that it turned out there were no good companies to outsource manufacturing to which there wasn't really, it wasn't feasible.
54:43Elon MuskOutsourced manufacturing actually is the exception of the rule. And, and just over time we had to insource almost everything for Tesla and same for SpaceX. I became very good at manufacturing because I had to.
54:58Elon MuskThere was no choice. At this point I might know more about manufacturing than any, any human ever has because I've done so many, I've manufactured so many different things in so many different arenas.
55:09Elon MuskI think probably more than anyone ever has.
55:12Ted CruzLook, that's. That sounds like an astonishing statement, but it's not a crazy statement. And you're somehow running Tesla and running Space X and Running X and running the boring company and running Neuralink and doing Doge.
55:28Ted CruzHow much do you sleep in a given night?
55:30Elon MuskAbout six hours on average.
55:31Ted CruzSo about six. So that's. It wouldn't have shocked me if you said three or four.
55:35Ben FergusonSo the next question is, how many
55:36Ted Cruzhours do you work a day?
55:38Elon MuskI work almost every waking hour.
55:41Ted CruzAnd Ben, he's not kidding that like when Elon and I were first getting to know each other, I suggested, I said, hey, let's grab dinner sometime. And I don't know if you remember what you said.
55:50Ted CruzYou said, I don't eat dinner.
55:52Elon MuskI don't have social dinners. Really.
55:55Ted CruzRight. I mean that. Yeah, I mean you obviously eat food, but the idea you're not going to restaurant for two hours. But the idea of, like I said, I don't.
56:02Ted CruzBut it was, it was just kind of matter of fact, why would I go to dinner? Like I. You jump, you work.
56:10Elon MuskYeah, I literally just have lunch and dinner, bro. During meetings and continue being.
56:15Ben FergusonHow many nights have you slept at your offices? You think your career, percentage wise, where you say, I just got to take this nap basically because my body forces me to and I got to get back to work fast and efficiently without going somewhere else.
56:30Elon MuskWell, I guess it started out with the first company, Zip2, which is a terrible name, but the first Internet company, we were able to rent an office which was like in a leaky attic, essentially for $500 a month.
56:47Elon MuskAnd the cheapest Apartment we could find was $800 a month, and we only had about $5,000 between our brother and I. So we're like, we're not. We'll just stay in the office.
57:01Elon MuskSo we got some couches that converted into beds, and we'd kind of sleep at night. And then we'd just have to, like, turn the beds back into couches before anyone came.
57:16Elon MuskAnd then we'd share at the YMCA down the road. And so that went. That literally was the. For several months, what we did. I was in great shape, you know, work out the way.
57:30Elon MuskI still remember that. That YMCA at Page Miller, El Camino in Palo Alto.
57:37Ted CruzSo that was a long time ago.
57:38Elon MuskSo it's been. I don't know. I've never thought to count it, but several hundred days maybe. I don't know.
57:45Ted CruzSo you're now the richest man on Earth. Do you still sleep in the office? Well, that's true. Maybe Mars will find someone else.
57:52Elon MuskBut I think if someone is a sovereign head of a country, they're de facto richer by a lot.
57:58Ted CruzDo you still sleep at the office now?
58:00Elon MuskI sometimes slept at the office, yeah.
58:02Ted CruzWell, thank you, Elon. This was. This was awesome. And let me say. And by the way, I put out on X the day before yesterday. If you were having a beer with Elon and could ask him anything, what would you ask?
58:12Ted CruzAnd got lots of responses.
58:14Elon MuskYeah.
58:15Ted CruzThe most common response people said is. Is. Is say thank you. Look, Texans and the American people appreciate what you're doing. You don't have to put up with this bs and you're doing it.
58:25Ted CruzI'm grateful. You're making a hell of a difference for this country. I appreciate you and the Americans appreciate you.
58:31Elon MuskYeah. It's essential for the future of civilization, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it.
58:34Ted CruzYes.
58:34Elon MuskIt's not like I want to get death threats, you know.
58:36Ben FergusonNo, don't forget, we do this show Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Hit that subscribe or auto download button from the White House. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for being with us on Verdict.
58:44Ben FergusonWe'll see you guys back here in a couple days.